A Perfect Match

Nora’s been having some GI bleeding issues off and on for a while now, she’s had bouts of colitis before that have caused her to have blood in her stools before but never for this long or severe. Medication has helped but has not resolved the problem so she will be having some exploratory surgery soon in hopes to find the source of the bleeding.

Nora always runs on the anemic side but last month the blood loss in her stool caught up with her, she was feeling really puny and her numbers were pretty low so she needed a transfusion. Nora had quite a few transfusions in her younger days and has needed them after surgeries but in this instance the timing wasn’t as critical so we wanted to give her some blood from a known source. So after a family trip to the blood bank we discovered that her daddy’s blood is a perfect match to hers. Now that we know this Montana can direct donate for Nora in the future when needed and that gives us all a great level of comfort. 🙂

Besides the issues at hand and after the transfusion perked her up, overall Nora is doing quite well, her weight has finally started picking up again and she is growing taller very quickly. She is still having lots of fun adventures and is her happy, sweet self. She has mentally matured a lot in the past few months and is becoming aware and learning about her medical issues and thankfully has become more able to deal with the unpleasantness that can come along with them. After the procedures Nora had last year she developed some really extreme anxieties revolving around anything medical and BM related.

She was having such a hard time that at the beginning of the year Montana and I felt like we needed help ourselves in order to be able to help her better, so we started seeing a family counselor who specializes in children with chronic medical issues. The counselor is wonderful and has really helped us learn how to guide Nora to work through some of her issues. That’s not to say that we still aren’t working through daily issues but that seems to just come with the territory of Nora’s strong will, the developmental stage she’s in and her medical challenges. We are just happy to see her not being in so much panic mode and are really hoping all that we’ve been working on the last 6 months will help Nora cope better with the upcoming procedures. We just want our sweet little Super Nora to only worry about regular 4 year old stuff as much as possible,
like what books she’ll check out at the library

and how many fish Daddy may catch

and discovering how yummy ice cream is on a hot summer day 🙂


being a super silly chef

And just having fun. 🙂

And fun will certianly be the focus tomorrow for Nora is really looking forward to some 4th of July fireworks!